


bloom

by mediumbear



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Barista AU, Barista Midorima, Enemies to Lovers, Florist AU, Florist Takao, Florists, Lucky Items (Kuroko no Basuke), M/M, Slow Build, Stupid barista terminology nobody understands, talking to plants, university student
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 08:08:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14637651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mediumbear/pseuds/mediumbear
Summary: Kazunari Takao is an absolute delight. His barista neighbour is a complete jerk. But the coffee-shop aesthetic needs fresh flowers and his coworkers want their coffee hit.





	bloom

Like bright petals unfolding from the flower, the sun coloured streaky clouds where it rose.

He was a quiet man, the first customer of the day – Takao hardly registered him browsing the selection outside the store until he’d come out front with stacks of boxes piled high in his arms for the display, and yawning hideously loudly for a lone worker. The sound was punctuated by the boxes hitting the pavement, when the visitor jumped in surprise, and Takao noticed him at last.

“Sorry, did I shock you?” He laughed to take the edge off, although his customer only glanced aside and adjusted his glasses silently. Neatly-dressed and almost ignoring him, he reminded Takao of a grooming cat pretending it had never slipped off the couch in its sleep.

Maybe he wasn’t quite in awake mode, either? Takao could understand that. The flower shop opened early in the morning, but he started earlier, with enough time to make the place appealing inside and out right in time for early-morning grocery shoppers and the commuters who lived around this bustling part of east Tokyo. The way that everything was laid out well morning after morning was mostly down to Takao’s muscle memory; having started as the cycle courier for the store and offered a counter job for how well he kept regulars, he was still giving his best every day, as though still in disbelief at his luck in snagging his first non-delivery role out of university. He rose from where he’d settled the boxes and dusted his apron off.

“I was that loud, huh? My bad, I’m still asleep at this time! Anyway… I’m still puttin’ the display together, but can I help you find something?”  
“There’s no need.” He remained staring fixedly at the sparse bunches of tulips lining the front of the shop despite his response.

His first customer of the day was… stern, yikes. That deep voice was unexpected too.

“Ah, then I’ll let you browse? I’ll be inside if you need me so just holler!”

Undeterred, Takao headed back into the shop, but felt the customer’s presence behind him and almost turned mid-step if it wouldn’t have resulted in probably several feet trodden on at once. But he heard the footsteps and sensed him.

Yeah, he was following him in. Awkward.

“I know exactly what I’m after, in fact.” came the same self-assured voice and Takao whirled around, still a tear in his eye from his slow wake-up, eyes readjusting to the slightly dim interior of the shop with its gradually brightening eco-lamps.

“Oh, yeah…?” he hazarded, arms ready for gesturing at the various areas of the shop that actually had products on display. But he didn’t reply for a moment and stood there instead, in all his neat bespectacled primness, seeming to stare very seriously beyond Takao’s ear, taking in the look of the shop beyond them. It was a long shop, narrow only if you cared about being brushed by ferns and palms, with colourful yet dark depths beneath the eco-lights still slowly brightening.

Alright, alright, so it wasn’t light in there yet and it was messy with the stock for the front on the floor not yet taken outside, and he’d left one or two bank bags of coins on the counter near the open register—and to begin with, _why the long pause if he knows what he wants?!_

“I’d like some white stocks, if you could…”  
“Sure, how many?” _Finally!_  
“Five stems.”  
“Right…”

He rung him up in relative silence –or, relative to how Takao was doing all the talking, but his client didn’t seem interested in breathing a word other than a snatched thanks upon leaving. Takao called a standard goodbye and stamped down on the stupid urge to follow him out and sarcastically wave and yell until he heard a proper farewell back. _Have a nice day! Have a lovely day, sir! A_ wonderful _day! You’re welcome! Ya jerk!_

Not that he was a jerk _really_ , simply… weird for the first interaction of the day. _Well_ , Takao reasoned to himself, _nobody’s really awake at this time of day, figures there’d be sleepy weirdoes on the streets._ Without giving it much more thought he sized up the boxes on the shop floor, rolled up his sleeves and finished setting up the outside display.

\--

Time ticked by at a steady pace, in the busy little street where Florist Sunflower stood its ground near the bus station. The journeying of salarymen up and down the slightly sloped pavement to the station was as perfectly clockwork as the young potted sunflowers that stood outside the shop, ever tracking the sun’s journey. Thanks to that, the shops in the approach had quite a following of regulars amongst those daily workers.

Until that summer, Takao’s job had been almost behind-the-scenes, equipped with only a bike with its attached cart and powerful leg muscles gained from high school basketball as the wheelie courier on hire from a company that loved to make everybody ‘self-employed’ on tax forms. He delivered in stock from suppliers to the shop in the morning, sacks of compost and tender flowers still in bud, and throughout the day cheerily wheeled out deliveries to local customers who loved flowers for their displays, bulbs for the garden, and even fruits when they were in season from those tiny wild strawberry pots and ornate chilli-pepper shrubs.

Despite offering him the role his manager had voiced some concern about whether someone as energetic as Takao would be happy off his cargo bike, away from the kind customer base that he’d built up over the year. But Takao (who’d only _happened_ to eavesdrop on the staff gossip) took that as a prompt to prove himself in his shop-floor work, and wore his green apron with pride.

It did mean he had somewhat of an idea of the area that was largely ‘the inside of the shop’ at the centre of the map, with countless little extremely-detailed stemming from it like blood vessels, a pothole here, a back alley there. The rest of the street and the bus network was as good as a complete mystery to him now he was a man on his feet, without endlessly looking for somewhere non-obstructive to park his bike.

Well, regardless of whether it was on a court or on pedals he did love to stretch his legs. So when the second and third staff members came in for their shift that day, he bartered for a little time, a little chance to wander up and down the street under the guise of “lemme pick us up something to drink” as though they didn’t have a perfectly good boiler and hot water dispenser out back (“it’s June, who wants hot tea in _June,_ auntie?”) and like he knew where he was going (“I’ll only be gone as long as it takes to, you know, do a loop!”).

“Drinks, hmmm,” his elder co-worker pondered, tying her apron ties with a practiced scrutiny, “Pick us up some coffee then, would you?”  
“Coffee? Right, right, iced from the cooler-“  
“No, no, just over there, see.”

She gestured out of the front of the shop, through the open door. Takao bugged a little at the pavement thickening with workers rushing in waves to the bus stops.

But there was, back there on the other side of the road past the muddle of people, a coffee shop. Some hip white-painted café-looking place that clearly had the English word ‘coffee’ on it, without any of the big brands he knew from the inner city.

“Something hot from there’ll do us fine, and it’s close by so you won’t get lost.”  
“Geh-“

She’d read him like a book, but Takao didn’t have the heard to argue with older women let alone his precious coworkers, so he ventured out, crossed safely, and kept his eyes on the wildly stark-looking shop front the whole time. It was blindingly bright once the morning sun hit it, with its blue thin lettering half-raised on the building surface – it was almost a wonder he’d never noticed it before. He would have thought the glare could have reached them through the florist window where the light hit the register and wrapping counter.

The inside of the shop had a weird atmosphere as he approached, and he almost lost his footing as he pushed the door open—

“Whoa—”

It was _rammed_ in there! The white interior of the shop matched the outside perfectly, and against it stood clearly what he could only describe as a hellish queue, a sea of dark-suited workers on a precious pitstop for coffee – instantly from standing near the doormat he was bustled against by the person in front of him in the queue, and any space of floor was taken up by somebody’s shoes in some cluster around the long counter. The poor shop was bulging with people; it only looked fit to seat about three students plus laptops in the little curved space.

Sweating from the temperature of so many stressed clients in one room, he looked for the menu, and saw none on the walls or behind the counter. Very occasionally someone would brush past with a small paper cup on their hurried way out of the shop, but he couldn’t see or smell for the life of him what it was he was meant to be buying.

“Isn’t it fine in a can?” he huffed under his breath, inching forward as the queue moved, eyes darting about for the pricelist. At long last when he spotted some more details on the counter – a pastry basket with only one croissant remaining, two bottles of water, a loyalty card stand – he felt he was getting somewhere.

“Order?” The worker at the counter asked, and Takao snapped back to attention with a nervous laugh.

“Ahh, yeah—I’ll have a, let’s see…” He stalled, and then spotted what he was looking for – probably—further down the counter, a little blackboard. He went to grab it but the worker merely turned it to face him on the counter then went back to expectantly waiting. But Takao couldn’t make out the cursive writing in the rush – there were several prices in yen, sure, but crossed out. 400 yen, 500 yen, down to 150? For what? To begin with, why the cursive in a rush like this?

He smiled and slapped the counter. “You know what, I’ll just get three coffees to take out.”

The shop worker, in his loose shirt and snapback, didn’t give an exasperated breath, but Takao felt him do it mentally, and sensed the person behind him start to lose their grip on uncaffeinated reality. Whatever for, he didn’t think too hard about it; he paid an amount that seemed far too low and took his place in the Waiting Pit as he named it in his head.

It was a weird place to be. Shoulder to shoulder with suits and newspaper edges, he found himself paying attention to all sorts of details, like the odd music that belonged more to a trendy skate-shop than a place to drink coffee in, a big old machine that looked like it was designed by Ferrari but only had one guy operating the levers and buttons, a big board in the background with a few numbers about altitude and washed… washing stations? And on top of it all, a quietness that made him wonder how come everybody was being so patient. He even spotted a few familiar faces in the crowd, but more heavily eyebagged - he guessed the coffee was what made these various husband types so friendly when they swung by for make-up flowers in the afternoons.

The crowd thinned and through his curious, bored peeking, spotted drinks in their neat paper cups being lined up on the wooden counter. Two were nestled nicely in a cardboard carrying-tray. He wedged his way past the folks he didn’t recognise to get to them.

“These for me?”  
“Three lattes.”  
Nobody else had come in with company, so. “That’s me!”  
“Please wait a moment.”  
“No rush, no rush!” Takao grinned, catching a quiet ‘oops!’ as he felt the ire of his fellow customers who were very much in a rush, and turned his attention back to the, the guy who made the coffees. The barista! Yeah, he remembered some things from campus life.

The barista seemed very caught up in something, and stood hardly moving. Takao spotted traces of shaking and lifting of a small metal jug in the man’s left hand, the third paper cup balanced delicately in the right.

 _What kind of hilarious place did you send me to, auntie?!_ Takao scrambled mentally for any nuggets of coffee-shop etiquette he may ever have picked up from one or two Starbucks dates, when they’d only got some sugary blended thing to drink anyway, but found nothing.

“Ah, that’s, uh, that thing—latte art, right? Will you draw me a teddy bear?” Takao joked, pulling the carry-tray out ready for the drink. The barista didn’t seem to find it funny, or maybe didn’t hear him, as he continued stopping his pours and turning the cup.  
“But if you can’t do a teddy bear, a puppy is fine too!”  
“Don’t be ridiculous. I have no time for etching, in fact.” The barista turned, and a flash of morning light bounced off his glasses straight into Takao’s memory.

_The grumpy customer!_

He didn’t remember a whole lot about the guy’s appearance, other than that softly-cut fringe, the eyebrows that had never un-frowned in his life and the glasses, but the sourness pinned everything down onto a mental detective corkboard.

“You’re the—”

But he didn’t respond other than to set his jug upside-down on some kind of rinser, and push the lidded drink into the tray with bandaged fingertips. “Drink it hot.”

 _Whoa_ , even his hospitality was stern – Takao picked up the tray and offered a wide, acerbic grin. “Yeesh, I’ll add sugar in case it’s _bitter_! Thanks for the coffee!”

He turned to leave, grabbing a handful of sugar sticks, and heard the voice cut through the harmoniser bleeps in the shop’s music as he left—

“It won’t be: my shots never channel.”

And whatever that was meant to tell him, it didn’t sound cool, at all. Takao was almost proud to say he’d travelled into a new dimension, where nobody chatted to one another and grumpy glasses-wearing guys spoke an alien language. If it wasn’t for having spotted the white stocks from earlier displayed neatly in the window he might have been a little put off by the whole thing.

His coworkers were happy with the coffee at least, sipping quietly and sighing in the back of the shop. They didn’t complain at least, so that meant it was worth the hassle, right?

“Aunties, how is it? Tastes better after the wait?”  
“Decent. I could get used to this.”  
“Ooh, yeah! You’ll have to go back there again, Takao-kun!”  
“Uh, uh-huh, right…” Not the answer he was hoping for, but fine – as long as he didn’t get asked to go again during that mad opening rush or try to barter with the grumpy guy… Leaning in the tea area he ripped open a few sugar sticks, and popped off the lid of the takeaway cup to finally dig in. He wasn’t expecting what he saw when the coffee steamed gently up into his face.

Crisp, lace-like ripples of white sat atop a creamy brown background, a design that sprouted in three directions. The edge around the rim of the coffee cup had slopped about messily from the journey across the road, but the centre remained clear as day.

Somehow, the design reminded him of those clustered-looking stocks before they opened in water.


End file.
